Anthology Solutions Yellow Machine Terabyte Storage Appliance
By: Sal Cangeloso
Looking inside the Yellow Machine, there is really not much going on. Inside there are four Seagate 250 GB, 7200 RPM drives, a board, and a small power supply. The PSU wiring is extremely tidy and the hard drive wiring is labeled so you will know which drive is which. The cover is held on with five screws and then is can easily be slid off.
One detail that should be made clear is that Anthology Solutions' web site currently says that the Yellow Machine can store up to 1.6 TB of data. This figure is misleading in that 1.6 TB was only chosen because the largest drives at the time were 400 GB. Now that 500 GB drives are available (from Hitachi) the maximum storage of the Yellow Machine is 2.0 TB. There is a 2.0 TB version of the Yellow Machine in the works, but don't expect it to be available from Anthology until drive prices fall a bit and all the necessary testing has been done. There is no word on the expected price or release date.
One of the most important features of the Yellow Machine is its RAID capability. The product can be set up to support a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) in either 0, 1, 1+0, or 5. This feature gives it a tremendous advantage in both speed and reliability over a single hard drive.
Each of these RAID levels has its own advantages, and though you can obviously only use one at a time, the Yellow Machine can be reconfigured to any of the four types. The Yellow Machine's drives are shipped in RAID 5 (striping with parity), which is going to be the best choice for most people because it offers the speed of striping but if any one drive were to fail the missing data could be recovered and the array could be reconstructed.
The other RAID options have their advantages as well. With RAID 0 (striping) will let you use all the space available on the four drives and has the speed advantages of striping, but if any one drive were to fail all the data would be lost. This method is good where speed and size is needed and a copy of the data exists elsewhere, as with video editing. RAID 1 (mirroring) will leave you with even less storage but with mirrored versions of each drive available in case of a problem.
RAID 0+1 will create mirror of two striped disks, this choice is not very popular as it is not as size efficient as RAID 5 and if any one disk were to fail you would be left with a single RAID 0 array of two disks, not a very secure situation. This is probably why Anthology Solutions offers RAID 1+0 (also know as RAID 10), which is a stripe of mirrors and it generally considered a superior choice to 0+1 because if any one drive were to fail you would be left with a full copy of the lost data on that sub-array, and you still do not have to write parity information as with RAID 5. According to Anthology Solutions' engineers, RAID 1+0 is actually the better choice because if one drive were to fail you would still have the information stored on another disk. The loss of two drives would even destroy just about any array, even a RAID 5, and the possibility is slim enough that is not really a factor.